


Typhoid Stuart

by Rileyspork



Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Gen, M/M, MJN Air Is A Family, Sickfic, Slash Goggles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 21:34:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1085938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rileyspork/pseuds/Rileyspork
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A passenger on an MJN flight happens to be the carrier for the newest pandemic, and it hits our intrepid quartet pretty hard. On the plus side, they get through it in typical fashion, with a extra little mushiness mixed in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Typhoid Stuart

**Author's Note:**

> So this is what happens when you alternate listening to Cabin Pressure and lectures on the epidemiology of pandemics while pulling 10 hour night shifts loading UPS trucks.

The quarantine was not as bad as it might have been. Adjoining plastic walled rooms. They could even hear each other. Unfortunately, they could also hear the doctors and researchers outside, muttering.

 

Douglas didn’t feel sick, in the least. He wasn’t worried. Yes, one of their passengers had been infected; yes, that particular man was down the hall, coughing blood and seizing. But Douglas hadn’t left the cockpit the whole flight. Carolyn and Arthur even seemed fine. The only one who had shown any symptoms was Martin, and Douglas was sure it was simple hysteria.

 

“Little Wome.”

 

“Alright… Portrait of a Lad.”

 

“Uhhhh…” Martin coughed, miserably, “Douglas, really, we’re going to die and we’re still playing word games?”

 

“I don’t see why not, might as well die entertained. In Search of Lost Tim….Charolette’s We...”

 

“Fine...uh….the Hobbi.”

 

“For a certain definition of ‘more interesting’, I suppose. The Executioner’s Son.”

 

“Oooh, can I play too?”

 

“Of course, Arthur. We would be delighted to have your literary insight.”

 

Carolyn groaned, audibly, from the room at the end of their hall.

 

“Winnie the Poo.”

 

“Great, Arthur. Really great…” Martin coughed again, harder this time, and took more than a little while to stop.

 

Douglas rolled his eyes. If Martin was distracted, he stopped moaning about how horrible and infected he felt. Therefore, Douglas was pretty confident, that he wasn’t.

 

“The Life of…” Martin coughed, hard.

 

Douglas sat up, and watched. When Martin removed his hand, it came away bloody.

 

Douglas swallowed. He got to his feet, walking to the plastic wall separating himself from his Captain.

 

Martin stared at his hand, for a long while, dead white. He glanced at Douglas, then at Arthur, who wasn’t currently looking. Carolyn was on the other side of Arthur, and couldn’t see into Martin’s room that well, with all the equipment and layers of plastic between them.

 

He swallowed, turned back to Douglas, “Life of P.”

 

“Marching very well with Winnie the Poo, I suppose.”

 

Martin looked at him, giving a miserable, dirty, and very slightly amused look. Unfortunately, mostly, under all of that, he just seemed terrified.

 

It didn’t take long for Carolyn to notice that Martin had shifted from going on about how much he’d been exposed, to telling Arthur how unlikely it was that any of them would get as sick as their passenger even if they had been, which they hadn’t, obviously.

 

It was only a few hours after she’d noticed, that Arthur, trying to play charades through the plastic with a nurse who wasn’t looking, fell against the flexible wall. Carolyn and Martin both went immediately to the adjoining walls, though Martin more slumped against his than stood at it.

 

Arthur looked up, “I don’t...I don’t really feel very brilliant, Mum.”

 

Douglas stood, still, watching across the three cells.

 

Martin and Arthur had been the only ones with direct contact, Carolyn having decided that Typhoid Stuart had been a little too aggravating to deal with herself, and Douglas having not left the cabin for anything other than using the loo. He had heard such fun words as “oral transmission” muttered by the doctors, so he guessed that it was because they had been coughed on that they were now ill.

 

Carolyn and Douglas had gotten away with mere spoken vitrol, rather than actual infection.

 

Based course taken by the unfortunate Stuart Snow, Douglas had a pretty good idea what kind of road his friends were about to travel. He did not like the view.

  
  


Martin sat on his bed, knees folded up to his chest, coughing into a washcloth, eyes fixed on the monitor at the end of his bed. Douglas knew more about what the readings said than his unfortunate Captain, but the red numbers and alarm that went off every time Martin got up and subsequently fell over, were probably hard to misinterpret, even without medical training.

 

So was the wheezing, coughing, and rather graphically, the blood and fluid brought up.

 

Arthur mostly slept, which was probably a blessing for everyone.

 

The neurological component hit Arthur first. Douglas would have said that was probably because it had a lot less to work on, but that didn’t really seem very funny.

 

Martin actually didn’t show much of the neurological symptoms, even two days after Arthur had started speaking in more gibberish than normal and run into a chair because he couldn’t really see it.

 

Douglas had a theory about that. Clad only in a hospital gown, it was plainly visible how underweight he was, and Douglas had heard the results of his bloodwork--he was pretty significantly malnourished. The symptoms Arthur was getting were because of the immune response causing inflammation in his brain. Martin had been far from as healthy as the robust and overly energetic steward before they had both been infected, and probably couldn’t muster much of a response.

 

Unfortunately, that meant the respiratory component was beating him pretty solidly.

 

He mostly laid on his side, hand on his chest, and coughed, with little respite.

 

Five days after he had first coughed blood, at around four in the morning, the alarm went off again, and Douglas sat up, watching. The nurse and doctor on duty were not there, they were on some other ward. The whole hospital was basically filled with quarantine patients, by that point.

 

Douglas sat up, watching the numbers on the monitor tank, and Martin, laying on his back, jerk, hands pressed to his chest, heels digging into the sheets.

 

Carolyn watched, exhausted and miserable. Arthur slept. He had had a seizure only a little while before.

 

Finally, a nurse came, and started donning the bunny suit that would allow her to enter quarantine.

 

It would take her seven minutes to properly seal herself. Martin had been oxygen deprived for nearly three, already. Douglas had spent enough time in medical school to know that wouldn’t do.

 

Standing, he strode to the sealed flexible door, sought about for a moment, picked up the fork from his dinner tray, and stabbed it through the acrylic, wrenching it down. He did the same with the outer door, then unsealed Martin’s outer door properly, sealed it behind himself, and unsealed the inner door.

  
  


Martin’s eyes rolled with semi-conscious, hardly oxygenated panic, as Douglas reached him. The muscles and veins in his neck and hands strained, as his chest heaved uselessly, his airway blocked with fluid.

 

Douglas shoved his arm beneath Martin’s back, lifted him to sit, leaning him forward, and tore the oxygen mask off the wall, holding it to the small man’s face with his free hand.

 

Martin wheezed, shuddering with the effort, burning with fever. He started to cough, finally able to get air around the mucus plugging every avenue for oxygen. The gooey, bloody material he brought up, Douglas cleared from his face with the gooey, bloody washcloth from the bedside table, though it wasn’t extraordinarily effective.

 

Douglas sat on the bed, raising the head of it to support Martin’s back, so he could free a hand to slip the elastic of the oxygen mask round the back of Martin’s head. Gently, Douglas adjusted the pillow, so it would actually support Martin’s head, instead of laying awkwardly behind his shoulder.

 

“Are you okay, Martin?”

 

Martin opened his eyes. Then he frowned, as though just realizing exactly who was in the room with him. His eyes flicked to Douglas’s empty room, to the slashed quarantine seals, and back to Douglas, at the splattered blood and phlegm on Douglas’s hospital gown and face.

 

He started to cry, silently, still working for all he was worth to get air.

 

Douglas shook his head, then looked briefly across Arthur’s room, to Carolyn. She was pale, standing with a hand against the plastic wall.

 

She nodded, slowly.

 

Douglas looked back to Martin. His little frame still shook with how hard he worked to breathe, he was still grey with pain and his lips were purple with lack of oxygen. Blood trickled from his nose, and was crusted at the corners of his mouth. His curly ginger hair, though matted down with sweat, at least gave him a little bit of color.

 

On a whim--after having given in to the most massive, stupid, and very consequential whim he’d ever given in to, Douglas felt he was on a bit of a streak--he started to push the curls out of Martin’s face, even as tears rolled down the sweaty, freckled cheeks.

 

Two minutes later, the nurse entered. She was eventually followed by a doctor, who flushed the chest tube, which had clogged, nearly killing Douglas’s Captain

 

A day later, Stuart Snow was moved out of quarantine. He was pale, wheezing, and permanently deaf.

 

A day after that, Douglas started to cough.

 

He woke up, not really understanding how he had missed half the afternoon. A hand gripped his wrist, and he turned his head, coughing. Martin sat in a wheelchair beside the bed, in hospital scrubs, rather than a gown. He no longer had the white bracelet at his wrist.

 

Martin stood, shakily, leaning hard on the rail, as he reached to hand Douglas a towel to cough into. Douglas’s tongue hurt, like he had given it the mother of all accidental bites.

 

He probably had, now that he thought about it. He’d probably had a seizure.

 

And Martin was talking to him. And he really couldn’t hear the other man above his own coughing.

 

The pain in his chest was enormous, and the room seemed to be spinning and growing darker..

 

Martin watched him, then after a very slippery and undefined unit of time, was sitting on the bed, holding onto the rail with trembling fingers.

 

Douglas realised he was really only becoming aware of things happening around him once more, because Martin’s other hand, the one that wasn’t semi-desperately clinging to the rail for support, was rubbing over Douglas’s own chest, easing the aching muscles that were never intended to be used for breathing, or seizing.

 

Martin said something again, and Douglas wasn’t even coughing, but he still couldn’t make out the words.

 

It was a relief the he could hear that there _were_ words, and Martin was probably very horse and soft-spoken right then.

 

But still, not a very _big_ elief.

 

He snapped back to it, when Martin slipped, and thumped into the pillow beside him. Struggling to push himself up on arms with the approximate structural power of overcooked spaghetti, Douglas watched him.

 

“Is Arthur…” Douglas started to cough. It really, _really_ hurt.

 

Once the bout was over, Douglas could only, breathe, eyes squeezed shut. Martin squeezed his hand, and Douglas eventually caught the word, “fine.”

 

If anything, that informed him even less about Arthur’s condition, because there was no way he was “fine” and if Martin was lying, he was unlikely to be giving off any visible signs of worry or relief that could tip Douglas off.

 

Well. At least Arthur was probably alive.

 

“And Carolyn?”

 

That was a much shorter answer, and Martin looked pleased at the question. She probably hadn’t gotten sick in the first place.

  
  


Eventually, it turned out that Arthur really was relatively fine, considering...it had just taken a while for the neurologist to figure out that while he had suffered profound hearing loss, he hadn’t experienced the significant level of cognitive impairment initially suspected...he was just Arthur. Douglas wasn’t entirely shocked that there had been some confusion on the matter.

 

Carolyn, as he had guessed, escaped unharmed, though probably with an even greater dislike for passengers than she had already harbored, and a ferocious affinity for hand sanitizer.

 

Martin was wobbly and wheezy and primarily about as vigorous as the plant Arthur had once tried to grow in G-ERTI’s galley, not quite understanding that a windowless section of an aeroplane was probably not the ideal location.

 

Douglas, for his part, sat with a sheet of paper declaring his level of hearing at 34 db, one decibel away from the operational limits for a commercial pilot.

 

Adequate for future flight he had been officially deemed. Isolated and muffled, he definitely felt.

 

Though at least he could hear Arthur, who despite having recently been a few o2 percentage points from not ever talking again, had become an enormously adept yeller of facts from the brochures he had picked up in hospital.

 

Sitting in the back of the cab on the way home, Douglas stared out the window, at the passing rowhouses, and the layer of cumulus spread out over the sky. He felt a weight on his shoulder, and turned, expecting that he had missed Martin attempting to talk to him.

 

Douglas didn’t feel entirely as bad about not hearing Martin, for two reasons--one, he didn’t necessarily want to listen to much of what Martin was saying in the first place; and two, because Carolyn confirmed that Martin was still hoarse and out of breath enough that he wasn’t able to make himself heard to nearly anyone, much to his frustration.

 

The weight was not, however, an attempt to rouse his attention. It was Martin’s head, as the younger pilot dozed against him. Arthur had fallen asleep  a while ago, in Martin’s lap, and Martin’s hand rested on the youngest man’s back.

 

Douglas watched the two sleep. Martin was fitful, Arthur densely insensate, as appropriate to their characters.

 

“Douglas?”

 

Douglas raised his head, as Carolyn leaned over the back of her seat to face him.

 

“Yes?”

 

“I hadn’t had a chance to tell you before...but that was incredibly brave of you.”

 

“No, it was idiotic.”

 

“Yes, well, the two are often rather synonymous. In this case, though, I disagree with your assesment.”

 

Martin stirred, and turned his head, burrowing firmly against Douglas’s shoulder.

 

“No, Carolyn. It was definitely idiotic, and what’s more, very out of character.”

 

He looked back down at Martin’s head, frowning, then, after a long moment, up at Carolyn.

 

Her expression had softened significantly, and she nodded, “alright. Yes, it was.”

 

Douglas nodded in return, with finality.

 


End file.
